


Turn, Turn, Turn

by nik_knows_nothing



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Dustin Henderson is a Good Friend, Eleven | Jane Hopper & Maxine "Max" Mayfield Friendship, Gen, Introspection, Light Angst, Lucas Sinclair Is a Good Friend, Mike Wheeler Tries, Steve Harrington Is a Mess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-08
Updated: 2019-01-08
Packaged: 2019-10-06 20:49:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17352350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nik_knows_nothing/pseuds/nik_knows_nothing
Summary: A year is a very long time to stay hidden in the cabin.Fortunately, Eleven-El-Jane finds ways to fill the time.So, really, it's not so bad.





	Turn, Turn, Turn

**Author's Note:**

> Katherine Tracy is the_most_beautiful_broom's creation, not mine, so if you haven't read her The Waitress Next Door yet, you should absolutely, absolutely go do that, because it's amazing, and Kat is a gift.

In October, Hopper says, "It'll be over before you know it. Promise. Won't even feel like more'n a couple months, you'll see."

Eleven—whose name is Eleven and also El and also Jane, with no last name—thinks that this is not very likely to be true.

She's been in the cabin before, and Hopper said, "Just for a little while" then, too, and it didn't feel like a little while, it felt like a long while.

But it's different, this time.

This time, there's a knock on the door, the very ﬁrst day, and when Hopper nods, looking kind of squirmy, like he knew this was coming, El slides back the bolt and lets the door swing open.

Mike stands there, looking pinker than she remembers, but also pale with the cold.

"Hey," he says, and his eyes jump from her eyes to somewhere over her shoulder, and she feels Hopper looking at the both of them. "I, um, I brought some movies. To watch."

El looks at the backpack he has slung over one shoulder, and she can't see Hopper, but it doesn't feel like he's upset about it, and she wants this, it's only fair that she should get to have this—

"Nothing scary," she says, and looks back over her shoulder at Hopper.

He looks surprised.

Like he didn’t expect her to check with him.

Hopper is a very nice man, but he can be kind of stupid, sometimes.

Of course she checks with him.

It’s very polite.

Mike grins.

“Nothing scary,” he says. “Promise.”

She steps back to let him in, and he brought some of the candy that she loves and also some of the candy she doesn’t love, but he does, so that works out.

They spend the rest of the day watching movies about a band of heroes who can move things with their mind, and they fight over stupid things and make up again, and the boy with the yellow hair has a father who hurts his friends, but it’s alright, because it turns out, in the end, that there’s hope even for the really bad monsters.

“You’re crying,” Hopper says, when the man in black who used to be evil is trying to talk to his son. “We can turn it off—”

“No,” El says, and her face does feel wet, even though she doesn’t feel sad. “No, I want to see how it ends.

 

In November, Max says, “I think we got off on the wrong foot.”

El looks at the other girl’s shoes and wonders, if she asked very nicely, whether Hopper would let her have bright green shoes like that.

“Not literally,” Max says. “Metaphorically. I just—if there’s something I did wrong—”

El frowns.

“Not wrong,” she says. “And not you. Just jealousy.”

Max’s eyebrows can go very high up on her face, when she wants them to.

“Jealous,” she says, like maybe she didn’t hear El right. “Of…me?”

El shrugs. “And Mike. I was wrong. Not your fault. Which foot is the right foot?”

Max starts to put one foot forward, and then realizes and says, “Oh, no, it’s just an expression.”

“Like the wrong side of the bed?” El guesses, because Hopper says that sometimes, and sometimes languages can be tricky.

“Yeah,” Max says, and laughs a little, even though El wasn’t trying to be funny. “I never really got that one, either.”

El looks and Max and wonders what it would be like to have hair like that, so that no matter how close they shaved it, you’d still have the brightest colors growing right out of your brain.

She wonders how to say sorry for being jealous.

But Max seems like she’s trying to apologize, too, for something that wasn’t her fault, and situations like this, they’re kind of scratchy and uncomfortable, and El wishes she were like Dustin, and always knew how to talk until things were okay again.

Max is scuffing one bright green shoe in the dirt, back and forth, drawing a line in the dust outside the cabin door.

“I’ve never been on a skateboard,” El says, instead of all the other things, and Max looks up and grins with all her teeth. “Do you think you could teach me?”

 

In December, Mike says, “I wish you were going to the Snow Ball."

He says things like that a lot, El thinks, always very sad, with a great deal of sighing that seems unnecessary.

("Honestly," Max says. "It's going to be a bunch of sweaty middle schoolers dancing badly and eating shitty food, it's not like you'll be missing much.")

Mike snorts, and El laughs, because the way Max said it was funny.

But she kind of wishes she were going, too.

"We'll have our own dance," Mike says, as he's getting ready to leave, and the rest of The Party is already pedaling off down the road.

"After the Snow Ball."

"After," El echoes.

"Yeah, after," Mike says.

"Just us, just the rest of The Party--we'll make our own dumb food and pick our own music. It'll be fun."

He always gets a little brighter, when it's just the two of them.

She wonders what he's like at school.

They're standing on the stairs to the porch, but El is standing one step up, so that she's the same height as he is, the way it was the ﬁrst time around.

El's hair is a lot longer than it was then, and Nancy and Joyce bought her all sorts of nice things to put in it so that it smells nice and feels soft.

Mike's hair is longer, too.

She wonders, if she put her hand out and touched it, would his hair be soft, too?

She hasn't kissed anyone since the ﬁrst one, more than a year ago.

She wonders what he would do if she kissed him now.

She wonders if that's something people do, just kiss without worrying whether or not it's okay.

"Alright," she says out loud. "That sounds fun, maybe."

But when she goes inside, after Mike's gone, there's a dress laid out on her bed, with short, puffy sleeves, like the one she showed Hopper in the magazine, when he asked if she liked any of them.

He's pretending to read the newspaper when she comes back out of the bedroom, and she holds the dress up in front of her, spins around and around like the people in the old movies on tv.

"It's just one night," Hopper says, sounding all sandpapery, like he's trying to be casual. "As long as we're careful. The dress is okay, yeah?"

"I like it," El says, and then borrows Mike's voice, because she knows he won't mind. "Pretty."

 

In January, Joyce says, "I don't suppose Hop's talked to you about school?"

"I've been to school," El tells her. "I know how it works."

"She does probably know more than most of the teachers," Hopper admits, and El feels like someone's blowing up a balloon in her chest, bright and happy.

"Probably," Joyce says, and the balloon swells up a little more. "But we probably ought to be sure."

Mike brings over an extra copy of his homework the next night, and she gets to sit around the table with the rest of them and complain about how hard math is.

It's fun.

But she lies a little, on the complaining, because math isn't actually that hard.

Science is nice, too, because science and math are just the way the world works, and both are easy, once you know the right patterns.

History is a little harder, but Max and Lucas insist that it's important, and they know a lot about history, so they can help her with that, and that's alright.

English is a lot harder, because it's hard enough to get all the words to come out in the right order when she's talking, and writing them down is even harder.

And Mike doesn't like English, and neither does Dustin, or Max or Lucas, and Nancy's good at it, but she doesn't like it all that much, she says.

But Dustin's friend Steve, he has a friend who's old like him and Nancy and Jonathan, and she actually likes this writing stuff, and she doesn't ask any awkward questions, the ﬁrst time Steve brings her to the little cabin.

"Cat," El says, and thinks of the little fuzzy animal that Dustin has at his house. "Like with a mouse."

"Sort of," says the girl whose name is Kat, not Cat. "But Steve's really the only one who calls me that. Everyone else just kind of followed the leader."

"Mike called me El," El says. "Before the others. Like that?"

"I don't know," says Kat-not-Cat. "Sort of like that, maybe."

(It's probably good that Steve isn't trying to teach her anything other than basketball, El thinks, watching Steve pretend he isn't listening to them talk. Sometimes she thinks that he's maybe not too quick with the really important stuff.)

When she tells that to Joyce, Joyce has to pull over to the side of the road so that she can laugh, she says, without driving them into a ditch.

"That's a good idea," El says, watching Joyce wipe tears out of the corners of her eyes. "Cars don't belong in ditches.”

 

In February, Lucas says, "So are you and Mike, like, dating?"

People have told El that her glare is scary.

She uses it anyways.

"So," she says, "are you and Max, like, dating?"

Lucas doesn't back down when she glares, because he never does, which is why she knows she can do it, and is also a tiny bit of why she likes him.

"Why?" he asks, sounding more than just a little bit curious. "Did she say something about it?"

El wrinkles her nose.

She and Max and Kat and Nancy have a strict "No Boy- talk" policy, which means that when it's just the four of them, they don't talk about boys like that.

Kat says it keeps things less cliché, that way.

"We don't really talk about that kind of stuff," El tells Lucas.

"Really?" He looks surprised.

"Really," she says, and then thinks about it a little more. "What do boys talk about, when we're not there?"

"Fighter planes," Lucas says, with the ﬂat voice that she knows means a joke. "Guns. Troop movements. Military history.”

"Ha-ha," El says, and tries to match his tone without borrowing his voice. "You're hilarious."

Lucas makes a complicated motion with his hand, and she doesn't know exactly what he means by it, but she reads it like he's part saying _forget it, it's just a joke_ , and part saying _I wish you guys did talk about this kind of thing. I wish I knew_ —

Sometimes, El feels the brush of minds all around her, and thinks about how easy it would be to slip through one or the other. Every time someone laughs at a joke she doesn't get, or says "remember that time" and then goes quiet when she doesn't, she thinks about opening the nearest mind, seeing where everyone's hiding themselves away.

She doesn't.

People don't like it, when you go crawling around inside their heads, and so El keeps her hands and feet and all other objects inside the vehicle at all times, like on the trains when they start to move.

But it would be so much easier.

So she knows how Lucas feels, and it's enough to make her say—

"I can ask her about you. If you want."

Lucas' head turns fast so that he can look at her.

"I thought there was a policy," he says.

"There is."

"You can't just break policies for your friends," he says, but he looks very pleased, nonetheless. "That's not a good enough reason."

"It's the best reason there is," El says, and thinks about a wrist rocket, and the very ﬁrst Demogorgon. "I'll ask her tomorrow."

 

In March, Dustin says, "You know, I bet we could make a lot of money in Vegas."

El blinks at him.

She knows what Vegas is, because she still likes to watch tv, and also because geography is apparently important, too, so she's had to learn all about all of the states.

"How," she says, and it doesn't sound like a question.

Mike and Will are off doing something school-related, and Max is teaching Lucas how to skateboard, which seems to require a lot more touching than it did when she taught El. Everyone's busy, and so Dustin and El are sitting at a booth at the diner where Kat works, dipping French fries into a vanilla milkshake that they split the cost for, since most of Dustin's money went to the arcade last week.

Dustin gets a gleam in his eyes, when she asks him.

"Well," he says, pushing the milkshake out of the way, talking fast and quiet. "So here's what I'm thinking—it would have to be during the week—"

They plan their escape for the rest of the afternoon, and neither one of them can drive, and there's no way they'd be allowed into the casinos, but it's still fun to pretend they're really going to do it.

"Just us," Dustin says, and El nods, very seriously, and says, "Just the two of us."

But then Dustin ﬁgures they'd need someone to be the mastermind, so they should probably bring Mike along, too.

El thinks that's a fair idea, but also, they'll need someone to drive, and so Steve had maybe better come along as well.

"And we'll need someone to talk to everyone on the earpieces," Dustin says. "So that's Lucas, I guess.”

"And we'd need someone to be security," El reminds him. "Max can take on anyone, so she'd better come, too."

And then Will, because El might need some help with the visuals of some of the games, and Jonathan, because he knows all about how the cameras would work, and then Nancy, in case they need a sharpshooter for when things go south, and then Kat, to help them fool the authorities—

"I think we'll need a bigger car," Dustin admits, once they've ﬁgured out that they'll need Hopper along, a liaison with the local law.

It's getting late in the afternoon, shadows stretching out across the parking lot, and it's easy to let the mind go fuzzy, imagine the rolling highways and the glittering city at the end of them, full of tough crime bosses and femme fatales and hardened detectives and professional crooks—

The world is a lot bigger than Hawkins, Indiana.

But that doesn't mean they have to see it all right away.

"We'll steal a bus," El says, and Dustin laughs, delighted by the idea. "They'll never see us coming."

 

_The others worry, sometimes, that the two of them won't get along, that there's too much of one in the other, and too much of the other in one, and too much of the Upside Down in the both of them._

_The way she sees it, they're too much alike to not get along, like soldiers who trust anyone in the same uniform, even if they've never met._

_Sometimes, he says that the others mean well, and she knows that he means their sympathy is sticking in his throat, cutting off the air to his lungs, and so she says nothing, and kicks her feet in the water of the pool._

_Sometimes, she says that things were easier Before, and he knows she's not trying to say that she'd rather go back, and so he doesn't say anything, the way the others would, and his feet in the pool are perfectly still._

_Of course they get along._

_They couldn't not get along._

_The others have all been caught up in the strange, the impossible, the spine-shiveringly-weird, but the two of them, they're old pros at it._

_They've walked in matched step on either side of the impossible since the beginning._

_How could they not get along?_

_It would be unthinkable._

_It would be unthinkable, and so Will Byers and Jane-Eleven-El sit side by side in the buttery light of an April afternoon, and neither one says a single word._

 

In May, Dustin says, "If we're doing that Vegas run, time's almost ripe."

El laughs, because this is an old joke now, and every time things get a little bit tough, she and Dustin draw up new plans for a spectacular adventure in some faraway state.

The last draft involved releasing a cage full of tigers in the main thoroughfares.

It's very realistic, El thinks.

It could totally work.

"Yeah?" she says, ready to laugh when he tells her his new plan. "When do we leave?"

He looks a little nervous at this, but Mike nods encouragingly, and Max and Lucas and Will are shifting back and forth, like this is something they've discussed ahead of time.

El lets her mind brush the thoughts nearest her own, and then she laughs out loud.

They don't go to Las Vegas.

They don't even leave Indiana.

But Steve drives them all up to Lake Michigan in Kat's car, and the water is colder than she expected it to be, but there's so much of it, and it's a sunny day when they get there, and the water is so, so blue.

They spend the whole week racing up and down the shoreline, and Mike's skin turns red and starts to peel, and Max turns even more freckled, and Kat teaches El how to swim, so that she can doggy paddle back and forth by Friday.

Hopper calls to check in every night, and El suspects that maybe he's the reason that it's not just Steve and Kat and Jonathan and Nancy chaperoning them kind of awkwardly, but even a couple other older kids who somehow got roped into looking out for them all.

It's funny to think about someone keeping an eye out, because it doesn't feel like observational mirrors and tinted glasses anymore.

Instead, it feels like sunshine, bright on your eyelids even when you close your eyes, and cold water around your ankles, and rolling your pants up to above your knees, and people standing just near enough to yell at you that if you get your clothes wet now, you're going to be cold all night.

It doesn't feel like surveillance.

El thinks that's probably okay.

"It's not Las Vegas," Dustin says, somehow apologetic, when they're in the car on the way back.

Mike is asleep with his head against the window, and Lucas and Max are slumped against each other— Will is playing with a rock he found on the beach with a perfect hole in the middle, and Steve and Kat are nothing but a hum of quiet conversation, way up in the front seat.

Behind them are the headlights of the car the other teens came up in, and it should feel too close, the way she can see them riding up behind them, but it doesn't.

"That's alright," El says, and she doesn't know quite how to make him understand, but he smiles anyway, so she thinks maybe he does. "It's a pretty good start."

 

In June, Lucas says, " Remember that thing you were going to ask Max about?"

El doesn't glare this time.

Mostly, she doesn't glare because Max already broke policy to tell her what she thinks Lucas is about to tell her, and also partly because he's still nervous, and she doesn't want to be scary.

"I remember," she says. "I broke policy."

"Right," he says. "Well, I just wanted to tell you. I owe you for that.”

"Probably," El says. "But that's okay. I won't collect."

"Are you sure?" Lucas asks. "Sure there's nothing I should break policy on? Nothing you're curious about there?"

"I already know about ﬁghter planes," she says, because she knows it'll make him roll his eyes.

He rolls his eyes.

It's nice, El thinks, when things happen the way you know they will.

"Cute," Lucas says. "I meant about Mike."

"Why should I care what Mike thinks about ﬁghter planes?"

Lucas throws his hands in the air, like he's fed up, but he's smiling, so it's okay.

"You're impossible," he says.

 _Yes,_ El thinks.

She is.

But later, Lucas pulls her aside again and asks, very serious, if she's really okay with him and Max being _him-and-Max_ , no spaces.

She thinks about standing outside the gym with her eye pressed to the crack between the doors, watching a girl with hair on ﬁre skating circles around Mike and thinking _go away, go away_ and _mine, mine, mine_.

It feels...stupid.

And mean, in a way that makes her stomach twist uncomfortably to remember.

But she knows why her mind gave her that picture.

"Max is the only one who chooses for Max," El says, and then, in case he still didn't get it, she says, in Joyce's voice, "And I think you two are just adorable."

 

In July, Joyce says, "Would you ever want to talk to somebody? About...things?"

About the dreams, she means.

El almost says, "I do talk to somebody", because she talks to Will and to Mike and to Max and sometimes Kat or Nancy.

But then she looks at Joyce and knows that's not really what she's asking, and she hesitates.

Then she says, "Can I...?" and Joyce only pauses for half a second before nodding, closing her eyes.

Joyce's mind is a tangle of blinking lights and dancing shadows, sharp edges and soft sweaters.

El likes looking in Joyce's mind.

She likes that Joyce lets her.

She ﬁnds what she's looking for soon enough, and then looks out through the eyes of Joyce's memory at the letters of recommendation, the careful application process, the nice ofﬁce in the city with the label on the door.

The doctor likes to look at peoples' minds, too, but he does it without any of El's slipperiness, or without Papa Brenner's sharp needles and endless vials and shocks.

He just talks.

El doesn't think it would be good for her.

But she thinks it would probably be very good for Will.

And Will wants to go.

She doesn't have to reach out for his mind with her own, doesn't have to slide through his headspace and take a look around in order to know this much.

She thinks about Joyce's original question.

"I wouldn't want it."

Joyce blinks, and El snaps back into her own headspace, feeling weightless.

"You don't—"

"I wouldn't," El says, and hopes the older woman understands why not, even though she herself barely does. "But I'm not the one the doctor's waiting to see."

 

In August, Mike says, "I think I really almost messed everything up."

Everyone in The Party is on friendly terms again, but it took a lot of work.

Even now, El thinks, words can be tricky things.

Some people use them better than others.

And once they've been said, they have a slimy way of sort of hanging in the middle of the air.

So it takes time to clear some words away, now that Will is doing well with his doctor, and no one's wanted to say _I told you so_ to Mike.

They don't have to.

He knows they told him so.

They're sitting on the front step, out at the cabin, and it's so, so hot, too hot to go inside.

He hasn't messed everything up.

He hasn't really messed anything up, El thinks, but she knows what it's like to get lost inside your own head, and she's not sure what to say without sneaking around inside his.

They're sitting close enough for her shoulder to press against his, and he keeps pushing his hair out of his eyes with the hand that's farther away.

Something about the motion, something about the closeness feels familiar, and El watches him push his hair back again, and then she thinks, _oh_.

This is as close as a kiss.

Mike kissed her that ﬁrst October, and then again at the Snow Ball, and El's asked Nancy and Kat and even Joyce, about when it's okay for her to be the one to move ﬁrst, or does it always have to be the boy?

It's probably not the best time.

Mike is waiting for her to say something that will make everything better, and she suddenly feels a surge of anger, because she doesn't know how to ﬁx him and it's not her job to ﬁx him, and then a sudden surge of something stronger than sad, because she wants so desperately to help him—

It's sorrow and anger, and wanting and waiting, and also something bright and dangerous, painful and beautiful all at once—

Mike starts to push his hair back again, and El leans forward and kisses him.

It's a little bit awkward, because she's honestly as surprised as he is, and so noses and mouths don't line up exactly the way they're supposed to.

Then it isn't awkward, not at all, and some part of El that's so far, far away thinks that this is probably a lot easier than trying to ﬁnd the right words.

When she pulls back, Mike's eyes are still closed for half a second too long, and then they ﬂutter open, and El just looks at him for what feels like a very long time.

"What was that for?" Mike asks ﬁnally, and his voice sounds a little bit like he's drowning.

"You didn't mess everything up," El says, and suddenly wants to laugh, although she doesn't know why. "Everything goes the way it should."

 

In September, Max says, "I'm not really used to having girls. As friends. It's kind of weird, you know?"

El thinks about it.

It is weird.

Friends in general are weird.

Nearly a whole year, and she's not really used to it.

"Good weird?" she asks Max, just to be sure. "Or bad weird?"

Max makes a face. "Good weird, duh. It's just something I didn't have a lot of. You know. Before."

"I know," El says, because she does.

In the Before time, there was only Papa, and men in white coats, and echoes in her head of languages she didn't speak, and the screeching of the creatures that came through the gates.

And now.

Now, there's The Party.

Now, there's Lucas and Dustin, and Joyce and Jonathan and Nancy, and there's discount candy from day-after-holiday sales and ticket stubs pushed into the frame of the mirror that hangs over the sink, and drawings from Will of the school and the cabin and the diner where Kat works.

Now, there are people she barely knows on the street, who still look her in the eyes and smile politely when they see her, like she's a real person.

Now, there's Hopper.

Now, there's Mike.

_(Now there's Mike.)_

And now, there's Max, who's looking at her a little funny, so she must be doing something weird with her face.

"Yeah," El says again. "Yeah, I know."

 

_She likes to think of her Before Time as happening to a different girl, sometimes._

_She knows she's still the same, just older and a little taller, but she pulls up the old Eleven, the Before-El girl, from time to time, just to look at her._

_She wonders what Before-El would have thought._

_If she could see it all._

_She tries to imagine it, but can't._

_It's too far away from Before-El, so much more than Before-El could have ever hoped for._

_So she tucks the younger self away, focuses on the Now-El, who is also Eleven and who is also Jane Hopper, all at once, and it's enough to ﬁll in all the spaces in her brain._

_She starts school in January._

_But for now, there's time._

_Time to scuff her shoes through a pile of leaves, time to send jokes to Hopper in Morse code, time to beg a turn on Max's board, and scrape up her knees when she falls._

_There's time for English lessons, and time for Las Vegas, time to kiss Mike and time to swim, faster and faster, until it's just her, no one else but her own self, in water that's cold enough to not feel like the tank--_

_Her hair grows long, long, long, and then she cuts it right back to short and watches it start to grow all over again._

 

In October, Hopper says, "Told you."

"Just a couple of months," El says. "It's alright. I remember."


End file.
